Consultant specializing in Microsoft Cloud Technologies and Cloud PBX

Menu

Category Archives: Office 365

In general, Corporate IT Departments want to control the end-user computing experience. Surprises are to be avoided. Pop-ups are anathema to Corporate IT because they result in annoying helpdesk tickets “should I click on this button?” (anyone who has ever served on a helpdesk, God bless them, is rolling their eyes because they know that non-technical people somehow cannot deal with pop-up messages. My favorite: “Should I accept this end-user agreement?” My sarcastic response: “Just click no, we can end this call now and close the ticket.” In all seriousness, surprise pop-up messages that are not communicated first by a trusted source, (“The IT Department”) can cause non-technical end-users to freeze up and panic. Therefore, changes in Office 365 that disrupt the end-user in any way (pop-up messages, etc) are seen as highly controversial (to put it mildly).

Here is a summary of the most controversial changes in Office 365 over the past six months.

The What’s new dialog prompt:

Why is this controversial? First, because this pop-up cannot be suppressed. The ‘What’s New’ dialog box will appear approximately once every 30 days to communicate changes directly to end-users. If the IT Department doesn’t proactively notify end-users about the contents of the pop-up, then this could lead to questions by end-users on whether it is a virus pop-up; many users have been conditioned (wisely) to not click on unfamiliar pop-ups.
Second, because it can advertise features that that IT Department may have disabled, leading to confusion among end-users. For example, if IT has disabled ‘Office 365 Groups’ then do you want a pop-up message to advertise features about it?

The “One-Click Archive” button in Outlook, announced on Feb 25th (here).

Why is this controversial? First, because it generates a pop-up message in Outlook that causes a non-technical person to have to make a decision.

This can lead to helpdesk requests from users seeking advice on what to decide (anyone who disputes this has never worked on a helpdesk before).

Second, because IT has no administrative controls to disable this feature. Why would someone want to disable this? Because if an Enterprise has enabled the Personal Archive feature then this button does not integrate with it, and instead creates a 2nd location to store archived messages. This leads to confusion by the end user on where to look for messages.

Why is this controversial? If you don’t have a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution such as Intune deployed, how will you wipe the offline files when the employee leaves your organization?

Docs.com – announced August 4th

Docs.comprovides a way for users to Publish Office Documents externally, directly within Word/Excel/PowerPoint, or by browsing to docs.com.

Why is this controversial? If your organization has limited external sharing (for security reasons) then Docs.com allows your users to bypass controls setup by IT/Security. IT Departments who have configured URL filtering to block Google Drive, DropBox and other 3rd party file sharing sites may elect to block Docs.com, since Microsoft currently does not provide any IT controls to disable this feature. For more information click (here).

Second, because your users will be receiving a pop-up notification to advertise this feature. So even if you block docs.com via a URL filter, you cannot suppress the what’s new dialog box.

Focused Inbox is essentially a way to quickly filter an inbox to show the most important items, similar to what Clutter promised, but with the advantage of not moving it to a separate folder. This is the same feature that has already been available to the Outlook for iOS (if you are using it).

Why is this controversial? Users will receive a pop-up prompt in Outlook to opt-in to Focused Inbox. After they opt-in, Clutter will no longer move items to the clutter folder. Read this help article for more details on the prompts users will see and how to turn Focused Inbox on and off.

IMHO – Focused Inbox is really a much better way to solve the same problem of decluttering an inbox by simply providing a user a ‘view’ of their inbox. IT should communicate the value of Focused Inbox rather than resisting it or scrambling to disable it. Office 365 admins will have mailbox and tenant level control of the feature to stage the rollout in a manner that works best for their organization. However, I feel this is a good feature that should be left on when it rolls out to first-release subscribers in September.

Honorable Mentions:

Modern UI in SharePoint/OneDrive. Did I miss any controversial changes in the past 6 months? If so, please leave a comment.

Have you been caught off-guard by changes in Office 365? Patriot Consulting offers a monthly subscription service to help IT Departments understand and prepare for upcoming changes in Office 365. Watch a brief video about our service (here) or drop us a note at hello@patriotconsultingtech.com to learn more.

When it comes to human attitudes toward change, I have found there are three types of people:

Those who embrace change

Those who resist change

Those who are indifferent towards change

This blog post (part 1 of 2) should satisfy those who embrace change, while my second post should intrigue those who resist change. Wait, why not a 3rd post for those who are indifferent towards change? People who are indifferent towards change are probably not reading this blog, as they would have read the title and sighed ‘meh’ before continuing on with their day.

There is a new configuration setting in EOP feature that provides an easy-to-setup method of filtering out unwanted and potentially malicious attachments by their file types. This feature requires a single click to enable, and can be configured from a list of the file types commonly found to be dangerous. For more information click (here).

April 19th: Office Deployment Tool allows Visio and Project (MSI) to be deployed

alongside Click-to-Run versions

This enables IT to deploy the the MSI versions of Visio and Project side-by-side with Office 365 ProPlus click-to-run, as long as they are deployed using the Office Deployment Tool. For more information click (here).

April 14th: OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC)

The NGSC is 4x faster than the old engine (groove.exe)

Includes the highly anticipated ‘Selective Sync’ where users can leave some content in the Cloud and only sync the folders they want

Large file limit increased from 2GB to 10GB

The sync engine now supports the ‘takeover’ feature, which eliminates the need to re-download all OneDrive content after the NGSC is installed

Note: The last feature we are still waiting for is the ability for the NGSC to sync SharePoint document libraries and Office 365 Groups. Until then, Groove.exe must run side-by-side with the NGSC OneDrive.exe

1. Send Availability

How often do we get an email like “are you available to meet tomorrow.” Now, when I reply, I can click a button and select available time slots, and with one more button press, I can quickly send my availability! In this manner, it is actually more efficient than the current Outlook full client! The closest thing we have to this in the full Outlook client is the ‘FindTime’ app in Outlook.

2. Attach Files or Photos while composing email

This is a huge advantage over the native iOS mail client, I still remember when I used an iPhone for the first time and could not find any way to attach a file to an email I was drafting. My friend snickered, “that’s because you have to go to the photo first, then click share, then draft your email.” Hmmm.. okay… I guess but that wasn’t completely obvious to me. So I love the more natural ability to attach a file after I start composing a new email. What I like even more is that it shows me files that have recently been sent to me in email, as well as files I have in my OneDrive (and other storage providers too).

3. Consume RMS protected attachments sent from “RMS sharing app”

One of the main obstacles for adoption of RMS is the lack of support for it on mobile devices. Now, with the Outlook App for iOS, I can open RMS protected content when it is sent from the RMS Sharing App. What doesn’t work is opening RMS protected email messages although it is apparently supposed to work according to this article (here). Perhaps it is a bug in the latest iOS client since it is listed as being a supported feature.

No Significant Drawbacks

One of the features I liked about the native mail client in iOS is the ability for multiple mail accounts to be added (for example, the ability to quickly check both business and personal email accounts). Happily, this feature works the same in Outlook App for iOS,, and I have not found any other productivity loss.

I have occasionally come across a few instances where the Outlook App for iOS is not detected as a mail client, for example, in Safari it was not one of the default actions when I needed to forward a URL via email. I was able to easily add it to the Safari quick actions, so that wasn’t too difficult. I think there was one other native app that was looking for an account registered as a native account, which I no longer have, so it failed to work. Other than that one drawback, I am very happy with the new productivity enhancements I have gained.

So I have switched from using the native mail client in the iOS to using the Outlook App for iOS and so far I am only wishing I made this switch earlier!

After migrating a mailbox to Office 365 Exchange Online, if the mailbox previously had full access permissions prior to the migration, then after the mailbox migration is finished the user may receive lots of authentication prompts. This happens by design since cross-forest permissions are not supported. Mailboxes that require full-access and/or send-as permissions should be migrated together in groups to avoid this issue.

But what happens if someone overlooks this requirement and moves a mailbox without moving the shared mailboxes along with it? This is where it gets very interesting. While it is possible to remove the full-access permission from the on-premises mailbox, that change won’t sync or take any effect and doesn’t solve the issue. Likewise, migrating the mailbox to Office 365 with the permissions removed prior to the shared mailbox migration won’t solve the problem (you might expect the original mailbox to see the newly migrated mailbox and that it no longer has full-access, and that would be enough to remove the AutoMapping feature). However, no, that is not how it works. To remove the auto-mapped shared mailbox, you have to migrate the shared mailbox, add the full access permission, then remove it again. That triggers the delegate’s outlook to remove the shared mailbox from the left navigation in Outlook.

Did you know that 91% of successful data breaches started with a spear-phishing attack? (According to research from Trend Micro).

Two of my customers have informed me that their top executives’ email have been ‘spoofed’ by hackers. I have included the message headers from those spoofed emails in the blog post below (scrubbing the names to protect the innocent).

The hackers are exploiting a weakness in the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) to masquerade themselves as a top executive, who then send an urgent email to staff to click a hyperlink or open an attachment. You can imagine what happens next: the computers get infected by Ransomware like CryptoLocker, encrypting not only hard drives, but also entire departmental file shares. Check your backups – this may be your only option to recover data that has been encrypted. The latest variants of ransomware are now trying to erase network connected backup storage too – so be extra vigilant to keep an offline copy of your backups.

So when my customers asked me what they can do to prevent email spoofing, I asked for a copy of the message headers that the attackers used and found out that the emails were getting through despite failing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) checks. SPF checks are the most common method to combat email spoofing. In this article I will describe how DMARC can better enforce your SPF record values to prevent spoofed email from passing through. I recently did a survey of 200 companies and found that only 12% have implemented DMARC so far.

SPF is implemented by creating a type of DNS record called a ‘TXT’ that contains an authorized list of senders for that particular email domain. However, many companies have not implemented the most hardened syntax for the SPF record, known as the hard fail “-all.” Instead, they are implementing the soft fail “~all.” This allows for emails that do not match the authorized list of servers to pass through, albeit with a higher spam confidence level (SCL) score.

Up until recently, it seemed as if SPF was all that was required to cause email filters to adjust the SCL high enough to cause spoofed emails to go into a quarantine or junk mail folder. All that started to change when the attackers started to use valid email servers hosted by trusted email providers such as GoDaddy. This caused the SCL score to be low enough for the email to pass through as legitimate “enough” to look like a standard email.

Additionally, and probably more significantly, hackers are now spoofing the RFC 5322.From header which cannot be detected by an SPF check. SPF is great for protecting against attacks where the 5321.MailFrom header is spoofed. Where SPF has problems is when the 5322.From header (the address that you see in Outlook).

Scroll down to see the (scrubbed) message headers in detail.

How do we stop spoofed emails?

Enter DMARC, which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”, is an email authentication protocol. It builds on the widely deployed SPF and DKIM protocols, and was submitted as RFC 7489 on March 18th 2015.

In a nutshell, DMARC is another type of DNS TXT record that builds on SPF and DKIM records and can be configured to specifically tells email filters to reject emails that did not originate from the senders authorized from the SPF or DKIM records. This is enough to stop spoofed emails cold in their tracks. Here is an example of a DMARC record:

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:postmaster@myemaildomain.com

What this does is to send items to quarantine if the SPF record or DKIM checks fail, and to send reports to an email address that you specify.

Prior to implementing a DNS record type for DMARC, it is important to talk to your marketing department for a list of companies that they send emails through, for example MailChimp. Those services must be in the SPF record otherwise they will be rejected. After the SPF has been updated, the hardfail setting should be changed to “-all” and the DMARC setting should be configured to reject. Organizations that aren’t sure which services their marketing companies are using can enable DMARC in monitoring mode so that they can first learn who is sending emails out.

To test out your email system, you can send emails to these addresses and get a report back:

I need you to process an urgent payment, which needs to go out today as a same value day payment. Let me know when you are set to proceed, so i can have the account information forwarded to you once received.

Awaiting your response.

RegardsThanks.

–Sent from my iPad

I am in the office today.

—–End Original Message—–

O365 and DMARC

Because SPF fails, and because DKIM can fail, and because this is all due to routing, EOP will not enforce DMARC failures if your primary MX does not point to EOP. EOP can still detect if a message passes DMARC when the DKIM-signature passes.

For Office 365 customers, if you do not set the DMARC value to p=reject, then it is recommended to create a message transport rule to set the spam confidence level to 9 so that it doesn’t hit the user’s inbox. The advantage of this is that your domain cannot be spoofed by outside senders for inbound messages to your organization which is common in spear phishing, yet marketing messages that go over the Internet are not affected.

Summary

In the first example, the email passed through the Exchange Online Protection filters. In the second example, the email was passed through MessageLabs filters. In the second example, since there was no hyperlink or attachment, we can only assume that the reply TO address was the attacker’s actual email address. Whereas in the first example, the reply TO address was forged because the attacker only wanted the recipient to click on a hyperlink.

After implementing DMARC, the message header section “Authentication-Results” will contain instructions to reject both of these emails.

Dmarc relies upon SPF *or* DKIM. So if you can’t do outbound DKIM signing, you can still enforce DMARC on an SPF hard fail to prevent inbound mail from coming through as spoofed.

Advanced Threat Protection from compromised Vendors

DMARC provides an excellent layer of defense to add to your defense in depth security policy, preventing spoofed mails from reaching your internal users. For situations where an attacker is not spoofing your domain, but is instead spoofing one of your trusted Vendors domains, DMARC would have to be implemented by your Vendor before it would protect you. In the trusted Vendor scenario, you can best protect yourself by adding an advanced layer of protection to scan for phishing hyperlinks and zero-day vulnerabilities that are not yet in virus definition files. One such solution is Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). ATP will detonate attachments in a cloud-hosted virtual machine and observe it for malicious intent before delivering it to your end-users. It will also replace Hyperlinks with ‘safe links’ which are scanned at the time the user clicks on the hyperlink. For more information on Advanced Threat Protection, or to schedule a free consultation to have Patriot Consulting configure it in your Office 365 tenant free-of-charge, contact us at hello@patriotconsultingtech.com.

I am sometimes asked for a very simple PowerShell script that can be used to apply licenses to Office 365 users in bulk. This is handy when you have a large amount of users who need to be assigned a license, for example, an Exchange Online license.

The bulk licensing script is available for download from Script Center Gallery on TechNet here:

The latest builds of Azure AD Connect, beginning with (build 1.1.105.0 Feb 2016) no longer rely on the Task Scheduler for scheduling when the directory sync runs.

Also, the default interval has changed from 3 hours to 30 minutes.

What’s really interesting is that Microsoft is now communicating that the most frequent interval that synchronizations can occur is now 30 minutes. You can try setting it to a lower value but the ‘CurrentlyEffectiveSyncCyleInterval’ shows you that they are ignoring you and setting it at the ‘AllowedSyncCyleInterval’ value of 30 minutes (see screen shot).

There is also a new method for manually forcing a sync: If you need to manually run a cycle, then from PowerShell run Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta. To force a full sync type Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Initial

The previous methods for forcing a sync were running the task scheduler or using DirectorySyncClientCmd.exe. In earlier versions it was using Start-OnlineCoexistenceSync. So depending on the version of Dirsync, there could be at least three different methods to force a sync. This blog article (here) by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT] gives a good historical overview of the previous releases and methods of forcing a sync as it has changed a few times.

This does not apply to you unless you manually upgrade to the latest version or if you are a new customer and downloaded the latest version of Azure AD Connect.

I noticed that after running a full sync and several delta syncs, that the users in the portal show as ‘In the Cloud’ rather than the expected ‘Synced with Active Directory.’ I closed and re-opened my browser and then they showed the correct status of ‘Synced with Active Directory.’ So there appears to be a bug with the browser interface where it is caching the ‘Status’ column and not updating after a directory sync. Interesting! So if you encounter this, try closing and re-opening the browser.

When it comes to planning an Office 365 migration, there is one gotcha that can be a surprise that is only found when signing up for a new Tenant. Surprise! Your domain name is not available because it has been registered in another tenant! Say what? While it is difficult to prevent this from happening (for reasons I will describe later in this post), there is some upfront planning you can be prepared to take if you encounter this during your tenant registration process.

This is more likely to occur with Education customers than Commercial/Enterprise/Business customers. More often than not, Education customers will find that their domain name is already associated with an existing Office 365 tenant that they did not create. However, this same problem can occur with Corporate customers because Power BI allows for automatic tenant creation when the first user signs up (if there was no previous tenant created with the primary email address of the user).

In this blog post, we will focus mainly on Education customers, because it happens much more often. How does this happen? It’s by design. A self-provisioned tenant gets created whenever a student or faculty member signs up for Office “Online” using their .EDU email address at this website here:

The first account to do this will actually establish an Office 365 tenant for that organization. This is a huge help to larger organizations with small IT staff, as it enables students and staff to have self-service access to valuable and free services from Microsoft.

Side note 1:Some schools have purchased Campus agreements with Microsoft, allowing teachers and students to install the full Office applications on up to 5 PCs or Macs (not just browser-based Office Online) . If your school provides this additional benefit, you’ll see the Install Office button on your Office 365 home page after you complete sign-up.

Side note 2: Microsoft has provided a promotion kit to help schools get the word out about the tremendous value of these services. This can help boost the schools image when trying to compete for incoming students $$$.

The tradeoff for free and easy is that the tenant name that gets created may not be the most ideal for long term use, for example: if a student name Jack using the email address of Jack@contoso.edu is the first to sign up for the free Office Professional Plus offer, and the tenant that gets created behind the scenes could be contoso2.onmicrosoft.com. To learn more about self-provisioning see this article (here).

Here are the licenses that the student will be assigned if self-provisioned:

This applies to all Office 365 Education customers (Universities, Colleges, School Districts, etc) – simply, any domain name ending in .EDU. This blocking prevents new users in your organization from signing up for Power BI.

It is possible to perform re-claim administrative authority over a self-provisioned Office 365 tenant. Some reasons why you may want to do this include:

Establish single-sign on with an on-premises Active Directory or 3rd party SSO service

Enforce IT or Security policy settings, especially because the default settings in an Office 365 tenant may or may not reflect the current policy of the organization (sharing policies, encryption policies, software installation, just to name a few examples).

Perform an on-premises migration of Email, SharePoint, or storage to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business

If the organization has a long term initiative around tenant consolidation, user initiated tenants based on email enabled sub-domains may not be desired.

For multi-national organizations, user initiated tenants may be created in a data center that is not desired by the organization.

Self-created tenants could be perceived as ‘shadow IT’ – where there is limited organizational visibility or even knowledge of what users have signed up for the services, and usage of those services.

There are many other reasons why it is advantageous to perform the administrative takeover of an Office 365 tenant, but those are the top three.

Before you begin the takeover process (described here) – you’ll first need to decide if you want to keep two separate Office 365 tenants, consolidate the accounts, or chose one versus another one. There are two good reasons for this:

1. Because your domain can only be associated with one Office 365 account.

2. The self-service tenant very likely has a number of faculty and students who may have data saved in OneDrive. Removing the domain name from the self-service tenant would cause data loss of anything stored in OneDrive, and will disrupt the users who were relying upon their cloud identity to register with Office 365. This is because passwords do not migrate over from the self-service tenant to the new tenant, and in many cases you would not want them to anyway, because you may want to use on-premises AD as the source of authority for authentication.

Need help with this takeover process, or guidance with your next Office 365 Project? We can help you deploy any or all of the 21 features Included in Office 365 for a flat rate per month. To learn more about our Cloud Advisory Service, click here, or contact us at Hello@PatriotConsultingTech.com.